My family moved into our house on an estate in Milton Keynes in 1978. I remember being somewhat embarrassed by my home in those early days because it was one of the first estates that had houses that actually looked like houses. My friends would come round to play Subbuteo and admire my traditional pitched roof and red brick walls enclosed with wood cladding. Some of them lived in dwellings with flat roofs and walls of perforated steel.

If you assume that we are products of the places we grow up in, then you will understand why I approached making a film about my hometown with trepidation. Milton Keynes has long been one of the most stigmatised places in the country: boring, concrete, soulless.

But the town shares something in common with me other than it simply being my home. This year, we both turned 50 and so to return with my camera in hand as a filmmaker felt a bit like getting in touch with an estranged twin. It was a chance to see which of us had turned out better. And to see who the years had been kinder to.

One thing I couldn’t possibly have known as a child was the high aspirations of those who took part in shaping the town. Norman Foster designed Beanhill, an estate of near notoriety blighted by design problems and subsequently social ones too.

Richard Macer … ‘When I left Milton Keynes at 18, I felt I had somehow outgrown the place.’

During my research, I talked to the former chief executive of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation and he told me he fiercely objected to the idea of flat roofs but, apparently, the lead architect was a huge fan of Le Corbusier and couldn’t stand the idea of bricks.

For what seemed like several years, my father undertook his own huge construction project while the town grew around us. He would come in from the London train, swap his suit for jeans and return to the back-breaking monotony of laying the patio.

Painstakingly, my father created a pattern of pink and yellow flags across the length of the house and towards the end of the garden. I’m prepared to bet that for 1981 it was the closest thing to a terrace anywhere in town.

Milton Keynes was a government-funded new town and the masterplan was entirely socialist in its principles. The town planners aspired to a genuinely utopian vision – open spaces, bigger houses, central heating and a grid system of roads – built as an overspill to the terrible slum conditions of inner-city London.

The idealism behind this infrastructure attracted a mindset of tolerance. I remember the secondary school, Stantonbury Campus, felt like a permissive society to my 12-year-old self. There was no uniform, no detention and you called the teachers by their first names.

The fully carpeted school channelled a kind of laid-back vibe of inclusivity and I remember being awestruck by one good-looking lad with white blond hair who had the audacity to come to school every day in nothing but bleached denim (apparently, his mother was a beautician). I think my friends and I did feel as though we were in some kind of benign socio-educational experiment, something maybe Timothy Leary would have embraced, albeit without the LSD. Not all parents liked it, but I think the Stantonbury of that time encapsulated all that was great about the town.

When I became a teenager, I started to part company with my twin. While I was finding interesting new clothes to wear and things to do with my hair involving crimpers, Milton Keynes would sit in its room and sulk. It was socially awkward. It would never go out.

There were no places to go for people who looked like me in this town apart from inside one pub called the Pilgrims Bottle. As a subculture within the beige culture of the wider town, my friends and I would meet at the Pilgrims every Tuesday evening and colonise one small corner of the pub. Here we could listen to Bauhaus and drink snakebite. It was only a year or so later when I left home to go to Nottingham Polytechnic that I discovered there were whole clubs for people like me.

In 1985, things changed for clubbers in Milton Keynes with the arrival of the country’s first true multi-screen cinema complex called The Point. This was step-by-step entertainment under one roof: dinner, movie, dancing. The Point was a red pyramid with a blue laser beam that shot straight up into the night sky and could be seen as far away as Bedford.

It attracted a yuppie crowd, but I remember it as the place where I had my first kiss. I had taken a girl to see a film, something like Dirty Dancing, and afterwards, underneath the laser beam, we’d smooched and she had fainted in my arms and slumped to the ground unconscious. Today, The Point is near derelict. It’s faded neon glamour feels anachronistic, like something from the end of a pier.

Part of the problem with Milton Keynes is the things that made it famous, such as the concrete cows and the hundreds of roundabouts. Throughout my life, I’ve felt the cows have become a kind of unwelcome mascot following me on my world travels. As a young person, you don’t want to be associated with this do you? The truth is I’ve always had a sneaking admiration for the cows, but they’re definitely an ironic cultural artefact that reinforces the notion that my hometown lacks real culture.

When I left Milton Keynes at 18, I felt I had somehow outgrown the place but I see now that I was lucky to have been part of such a remarkable project. Not for one minute had it occurred to me that my hometown was arguably the greatest feat of social engineering ever undertaken. I hadn’t been aware that some of the best young architects of their time saw a patchwork of green fields in north Buckinghamshire as a blank canvas for their masterpieces.

Story of cities #34: the struggle for the soul of Milton Keynes

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Today, I live in Manchester. I certainly wasn’t drawn to the rain, but I do like the Victorian architecture. As a father of two boys, I can’t help seeing that the grass in Milton Keynes is quite a bit greener – just the simple fact that you don’t have to walk to a park to play football because the grass is all around you.

Perhaps my disaffection with the town spoke more audibly about a desire to define myself away from my parents. They have always loved the town and still live in the house my sister and I grew up in. My father cannot understand why anyone would choose London over Milton Keynes, but he grew up in the capital when Islington was a slum. Whenever I turned the camera on him, he would say, “When a man is tired of Milton Keynes, he is tired of life.”

Someone who works at Milton Keynes council told me that it is at a critical juncture in its evolution. According to her, the town is dangerously close to becoming “another Crewe”, a place with great connectivity but a cultural desert. The place is desperate to acquire some “cachet” in order to move to the next stage in its development.

I guess that means a place that is more than clean and safe. I think Milton Keynes’ cachet lies in a true appreciation of its founding principles. Egalitarian social engineering. Vast green open spaces. Original and avant-garde architecture. OK, it hasn’t quite achieved utopia but evidently you never arrive there anyway.

• Richard Macer presents Milton Keynes and Me on BBC4 on 16 August at 9pm as part of a season of programmes on utopia